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The death of Satan was a tragedy For the imagination.

Wallace Stevens

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Wallace Stevens
Age: 75 †
Born: 1879
Born: October 2
Died: 1955
Died: August 2
Journalist
Lawyer
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
Writer
Satan
Tragedy
Imagination
Death

More quotes by Wallace Stevens

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Man is an eternal sophomore.
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The purpose of poetry is to make life complete in itself.
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In a world of universal poverty The philosophers alone will be fat Against the autumn winds In an autumn that will be perpetual.
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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
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The thinker as reader reads what has been written. He wears the words he reads to look upon Within his being.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing.
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The chrysanthemums' astringent fragrance comes Each year to disguise the clanking mechanism Of machine within machine within machine.
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Sentimentality is a failure of feeling.
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It is never the thing but the version of the thing: The fragrance of the woman not her self, Her self in her manner not the solid block, The day in its color not perpending time, Time in its weather, our most sovereign lord, The weather in words and words in sounds of sound.
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Reality is a cliché from which we escape by metaphor.
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Poetry is a finikin thing of air That lives uncertainly and not for long Yet radiantly beyond much lustier blurs.
Wallace Stevens
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The wind shifts like this: Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her.
Wallace Stevens
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It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.
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There may be always a time of innocence. There is never a place.
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Nothing could be more inappropriate to American literature than its English source since the Americans are not British in sensibility.
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What is there in life except one's ideas, Good air, good friend, what is there in life?
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The exceeding brightness of this early sun Makes me conceive how dark I have become.
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Poetry has to be something more than a conception of the mind. It has to be a revelation of nature. Conceptions are artificial. Perceptions are essential.
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The prologues are over. It is a question, now, Of final belief. So, say that final belief Must be in a fiction. It is time to choose.
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All poetry is experimental poetry.
Wallace Stevens